There are some things that computers are good at. There are other things where humans are
better. But not for long! AI is here. Computers are learning how to do human stuff… but
BETTER. They will be faster. Smarter. WAYYYY more
rational. If this sounds scary, that’s good! Because it is.
…But for now we may as well enjoy stuff it can do like image upscaling!
If you asked me a few years ago if you could make an image more detailed by making it bigger,
I would laugh in your pathetic little face! Those CSI shows where they used ENHANCE to
uncover details in images were internet memes. Nobody took it seriously. Shows how much we
know. Because AI upscaling is here and it’s terrifyingly good.
I’m using Topaz Gigapixel AI to upscale the images in this video. I did actually buy
it and everything because this program has given me as much pleasure as shooting palm
trees in Crysis, though they do have a 30 day trial on their site.
The way AI upscaling works is… well, nobody knows. It’s magic! It learns what images
should look like, then applies that knowledge to new stuff. If I upscale this tree, it almost
becomes lots and lots of little trees joined together to give the impression that it’s
actually a more detailed tree. It’s super effective!
AI upscaling really loves foliage. You know something it doesn’t like? Faces.
URGH! URGH!
URGH!!! I did wonder if this video would get demonetized
for showing this, but then I remembered that AI algorithms thought this was what a face
looked like in the first place… so Youtube’s filters will probably like it.
AI isn’t actually bad at faces. It’s just that we’re very good at faces. We know what
they’re meant to look like, and can detect when something’s wrong with them. We’re
not so good with trees, so this looks perfectly acceptable to us.
That’s why there’s a phenomenon known as ‘uncanny valley’, which is when digital
or drawn people look ALMOST real, but not quite, which makes them look really creepy
to us.
I guess I’ll get the obvious out of the way: you can’t keep upscaling forever. It
can’t get details that weren’t captured in the original image. It can only fake it
by adding small touches that it thinks should go there.
My friend got bullied by a van driver who kept braking and swerving, seemingly to cause
a crash. They came to me asking if I could somehow retrieve their numberplate from THIS.
Uh, yeah… I don’t think so. I’m not proud of myself but I did try running it through
this program in the hope of a miraculous ‘ENHANCE!’ moment.
Obviously it didn’t work! But I had to try it didn’t I.
So let’s get to some examples, of what works and what doesn’t. I tried on a few old family
photos. It would be great if I could some how make these crisper and clearer… and
a few of them, I did! Here’s one of my MUM. Now, I’ve blurred
her face out cos I don’t want thousands of people staring at my MUM, but also because
we’ve established already that AI does terrifying things to faces. Actually, I will show her
face, but horrendously upscaled from a tiny image. There.
Here’s before… …Here’s after. What a difference!
Something I learned from the hours of fun I had messing around with this program is
that, for best results… you have to shrink the image. That’s right: to upscale, you
must first downscale! Bear with me here! It obviously depends on
the image. But for these old ones, the original scans aren’t the clearest. They have a lot
of blur, which the AI must look at and go ‘hmm I had better keep this blur!’
While if there’s greater contrast between the pixels, it enables the AI upscaling to
splurt its creative juices all over the picture in the most delicious of ways.
So here’s the original, here it is AI upscaled normally. Here’s the half-res original…
and here’s the upscaling for that. And now you can see the upscaled versions
compared. This makes me feel good for humanity that
AI still needs a helping human hand for best results!
Although impressive, it isn’t magic. I was a bit late with this video because I spent
the best part of a week messing about with it on all kinds of stuff and I’ve gotten
pretty good at knowing how good results will be before I even try them now.
AI upscaling can do 2 things: it can make a horribly pixelated picture a lot better,
or it can make an already decent picture… more decent.
Let’s start with pixelated images. Here is the skyline of San Francisco. I got this
original image, squished it down to just 384x216 pixels… and then gave that to the AI upscaler
and it produced THIS. Impressive, isn’t it. It really adds clarity to the outlines
of the buildings, as well as making sense of the mess of pixels on the walls and windows.
But it’s not ‘perfect’. You can see lots of phantom colours creeping into this
one- the buildings almost look like they’ve been drawn in crayon! The pyramid building
looks great in my opinion, having successfully made the sides smooth from what was about
6 pixels of steps before. And the windows were each about a pixel large, which I think
makes this upscaling very impressive. Something interesting to note here is the jpegging artifacts
in the sky- the AI has taken those and has painted a larger part of the picture with
them! The Salesforce tower has been strangely smoothened- if we look at the original image
you can see it should actually have very clear rows of windows. But from the low res image
it’s become a huge rounded dildo. As usual I feel it’s done a good job with the trees-
especially when all it looks like before is a jumble of random brown pixels.
Yosemite! Again, trees look more tree-y and I think it’s nicely textured the mountains
as well. To think that from just a few pixels it can conjure up a convincing rock texture.
Imagine if it got it wrong and made them look like soup or something! As always, peoples’
faces turn into nightmare fuel. I mean what’s going on with this cartoon-girl here?
Now the Grand Canyon! Looks like my face is trapped in a plastic bag, but the rest of
the image is greatly improved- I’d say it looks closer to the original image than it
does to the pixelated one. But you’re free to disagree.
Now to the tallest building in Devon. AI upscaling makes the clouds look very much like clouds,
the grass like grass, the pavements also look a hell of a lot better… but again I think
the trees are the best bit of the picture! If AI could have a favourite, you know it’s
to upscale branches. I feel like a broken record here but it continues
to make everything look a lot more like what they are. Let’s just forget about the pixelated
image here and compare the upscaled with the original- I can’t even tell from the sky
which is the original and which is upscaled, even though everything ends up looking quite
different. For once I don’t think it does a very good job on the grass- it makes it
look more like branches, when in the original you can clearly see they’re blades of grass.
Ha, stupid AI. This beautiful view of the Cornish coastline
was unfairly crushed down to just 240 pixels wide- the lowest I went in this test! And
when it’s shrunk down this far, the AI begins to struggle. It manages what looks like a
10-year old phone-photo: blurry, lacking detail, horrible halos around everything… but I
think you can agree it still looks a helloolwollalot better than THIS.
Now onto a graveyard shot, which I didn’t pixelate AS much as with the previous pictures.
With this extra detail, the AI has a field day, lavishing the grave stones with fake
writing, nice bumpy stone textures, the trees look great, the only thing that’s a bit
off is the grass. The AI got a little too excited about this and made them look like
dancing snakes, without anywhere near as many strands as in the original. But I think you
can agree that as a whole, this upscaled image’s quality is very acceptable.
And lastly we’ll see what it does to this adorable doge. It correctly makes it look
very hairy. But I’m more impressed with the background- it has successfully identified
that it’s meant to be blurry, so instead of adding more detail like it has to the dog,
it’s nicely blurred it so that it looks out of focus again, just like with the original
image. That in my opinion is really impressive, and shows intelligence. When we compare the
upscaled dog with the original you can see the hair has lost a bit of clarity. It’s
almost like comparing low and high texture detail in a videogame, isn’t it. Integrated
graphics… tress FX! Integrated graphics… tress FX! And so on.
So upscaling from a pixelated image is something AI really excels at. I guess these look so
bad in the first place that AI can ONLY make it look better. The upscaling might not necessarily
make them look more like the original picture again, but it’s worth it for the de-blurring
alone and more often than not it works a small miracle by nicely texturing various surfaces
in a convincing manner. But what about making a decent picture look…
more decent? I mean, surely it’s the same goal, but just starting with more pixels?
I first tried upscaling the original images but it resulted in some crazy 30,000 pixel-wide
photos which killed my PC, so instead I’ll just get small bits from the original images
to upscale. Let’s do the salesforce tower justice. But
I don’t know if it has- it looks disappointingly similar in my opinion, minus the pixellation.
I mean don’t get me wrong I think it’s an improvement, but it just isn’t as impressive
as drawing a whole picture from just a few pixels.
I decided to zoom in on Yosemite’s famous half-dome, and again… not as impressed with
the result, which appears too pastel-y. I blame this on the original image’s blur
and haze- it’s not like it’s upscaling pixels with great contrast… which makes
the resulting harsh tones all the more mysterious in my opinion. I don’t think the AI knew
what it was doing here. Just out of curiosity I halved the resolution
of the before image, to see if increased contrast would lead to better results. You could say
it’s just a quarter dome now! But this didn’t particularly improve the upscaling. In fact,
it introduced more oddly coloured halos around stuff.
The Grand Canyon: one of the wonders of the world. A spectacular sight! …and so from
this image I chose to upscale my FACE. And again, it’s almost like it doesn’t know
what to do with the image. I swear it’s added some wrinkles that weren’t there before.
But it doesn’t even make the hair look hairier- something that AI upscaling usually loves!
Again, I tried halving the resolution of the original image. And this time I think it really
improved the result. I look a lot more crisp… at least the hair now looks hairier. And my
bag strap looks like it’s gotten an HD makeover. Well done, AI. You’ve redeemed your face-upscaling
in this example. As a treat I fed it this tree image. AND IT
WENT TO TOWN ON IT! Beautiful. Thousands of creeping, criss-crossing twigs and branches.
You can tell it enjoyed upscaling this. I think the original image was taken on a Google
Pixel, which likes to over-sharpen its images, so maybe that’s why this result is so good.
We’ve learned that it likes high-contrast images. We know it often upscales better if
the original image is shrunk down a bit. So that’s what I chose to do with this shot
of the sea. I shrunk the original to a third of the size and got that to be AI-upscaled.
Is the result better than the original image? I think it is. Some of the grain is lost.
Some of the clarity in the darker areas also. But the whole image looks more in-focus, the
distant sea looks a lot clearer, and I also like what it’s done to the grass just here.
It’s pretty much behaved like a denoiser, only it’s noisened up the bits that had
no noise before. I did the same with this shot, and again I
think upscaling from an image one third the size results in something better than the
original! Make no mistake about it- you can’t get closer to reality than the original image.
But there’s no mistaking that the upscaler has made the image crisper and in parts, seemingly
more detailed. If nothing else, I reckon this AI upscaling
could be used to compress images. Shrinking them to a third will make the filesizes 9x
smaller, and it generally upscales them to close to the original quality again. Of course
I’m sure it would sometimes horribly mess it up. But it has potential!
I got to this bit of the video and wondered if it was a bit disrespectful to upscale grave
stones- especially if I single one out in particular. Almost seems like bullying.
So I’m going to use this picture instead. Believe it or not, no filters were used here.
Just my Google Pixel’s powerful post-processing magical HDR effects. Oh and a lens flare.
I’ll just get rid of that. I think we should try and upscale the JOLLY MILLER! There’s
a lot of noise in this original image- let’s see what the upscaling AI thinks of that.
Honestly, not too impressed with the result. It denoises it somewhat, and of course gets
rid of pixellation on the signs. Jazzercise is looking pretty damn hot there. But I feel
maybe this image was too muddy to do much to the building itself.
…But then I halved the original image’s size… and this happened. Oh my God, this
is a true ‘enhance!’ moment. It’s removed the noise and has pretty much drawn a door
that wasn’t really there before. And look at the fence in the window’s reflection!
And the tiles on the roof! And the bricks themselves! I know this isn’t NEW detail-
it’s just the AI doing stuff with what was there already. But it’s good enough for
me, even if the result is a bit like a water colour at times.
Also in case you were wondering, the gravestones ended up looking sharper and the jpeg artefacts
disappeared. How about the dog’s eye. I was unimpressed
with this- it doesn’t look quite so much like ‘hair’ any more- and in parts it
looks like it’s attempted to split hairs into smaller ones! Which I did wonder if it
would try. I halved the resolution of the before image and this led to a clearer result-
but in my opinion it looks fake and has too much contrast, and looks less like hair than
it did previously. Sorry, dog. AI doesn’t like you… but you’ll forever be man’s
best friend. Or at least until AI takes your job as well.
If nothing else, I reckon this AI upscaling could be used to compress images. Shrinking
them down to a third will make the filesizes 9 times smaller, and it generally upscales
them to close to the original quality again. Of course, I’m sure it would sometimes horribly
mess it up. But it has potential! We’ve seen real life images. But what about
games? And could this technology be used to upscale videos? I hope to answer that, and
many more things, in future videos. I’ll just end this with some terrifyingly upscaled
faces. Have fun!